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    Be Here Now
    Be Here Now
    Be Here Now
    Ebook524 pages6 hours

    Be Here Now

    By Ram Dass

    4.5/5

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    • Spirituality

    • Meditation

    • Enlightenment

    • Consciousness

    • Yoga

    • Chosen One

    • Spiritual Awakening

    • Mentor

    • Hero's Journey

    • Power of Love

    • Journey

    • Wise Mentor

    • Fish Out of Water

    • Prodigal Son

    • Journey of Self-Discovery

    • Self-Discovery

    • Mindfulness

    • Love

    • Personal Growth

    • Karma

    About this ebook

    "Now, though I am a beginner on the path, I have returned to the West for a time to work out karma or unfulfilled commitment. Part of this commitment is to share what I have learned with those of you who are on a similar journey. One can share a message through telling 'our-story' as I have just done, or through the teaching methods of yoga, or singing, or making love. Each of us finds his unique vehicle for sharing with others his bit of wisdom. For me, this story is but a vehicle for sharing with you the true message. . . the living faith in what is possible."—from Be Here Now

    In 1970, Ram Dass' Be Here Now became the counter-culture bible for thousands of young people seeking enlightenment in the midst of the darkness of Vietnam. It was a pioneering bridge, written in colloquial language, from the psychedelic 60s to eastern spirituality, and over the years has sold and continues to sell more than two million copies.

    Now in an e-book edition, Ram Dass' message is brought to life for a new generation of seekers. This will be a beautiful digital edition of this classic and enlightening book.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateNov 2, 2010
    ISBN9780062066602
    Be Here Now
    Author

    Ram Dass

    Ram Dass is the author of the landmark classic Be Here Now and the acclaimed Still Here and Be Love Now. After meeting his guru in India in 1967, Ram Dass became a pivotal spiritual influence on American culture, introducing the West to Eastern spiritual practices.

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    Reviews for Be Here Now

    4.5/5

    80 ratings13 reviews

    What our readers think

    Readers find this title to be a must-read for those seeking to understand the purpose of life and uplift their spirits. The book covers a wide range of subjects and is suitable for both beginners and experienced readers. It explores different religions without excluding anyone. Many readers plan to lend it to friends and re-read it in the future. Overall, it is an insightful and uplifting work that offers a journey towards awareness and a sense of universal unconditional love.

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      Insightful and uplifting work from the master. Absolutely loved it
    • 5/5
      Amazing book that I will re-read for many years to come. Opened my eyes on many levels.
    • 5/5
      you can feel the universal unconditional love through this book. loved it
    • 5/5
      A book which helps us to realise the purpose of our life by enhancing and uplifting our spirit. Must recommended for pope who want to really know the underlying truth of love ,consciousness and the Loved one.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      An illuminating travelogue of one man's journey towards awareness. Much to learn from this book.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Amazing book. It covers a lot of different subjects and uses language suitable for beginners as well as more experienced people. I really like how it mentions different religions, without alienating other religious or non religious people. I will definitely be buying a copy of this to lend to friends.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Reading this book is a mystical experience in itself. It begins with the story of Ram Dass' transformation from a stuffy psychologist to a psychedelic madman to a devoted Hindu disciple to one of the most influential teachers of yoga in the West. The middle section presents a distillation of yogic philosophy interspersed with illustrations. The book ends with a "Cookbook for a Spiritual Life," offering practical advice for accelerating your spiritual evolution.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Ram Dass' message is more important now than ever. We can lead really happy lives very simply...which is not only good for our spirits, but also good for the planet. I read this as part of my spiritual education back in the 70's, so I am reluctant to say that schoolchildren should read this book before they get too socialized (i.e. brainwashed by the System). But I'm leaning pretty heavily in that direction. Now is all there is. The more our minds live in the now, the better people we will be.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      One of the most profound reading experiences of my life. Deeply affected the way I view reality and being. Hallucinogens are not required, but help if you don't possess the spiritual depth or inquisitive open-mindedness that this book requires.
    • 5/5
      i think this may be essential reading in some way.
    • 4/5
      I guess this would be called a graphic novel these days. Interesting if you are doing nothing and want to quantify the experience. This book was given to me by a neat lady, G. Ann Suzuki, who wrote her name in it. Very good at Shiatsu.
    • 4/5
      Well, this is a bit dated, more in style than content. If you aren't here, now, then where are you?
    • 5/5
      For anyone on a spiritual journey who is open to far-out experiences, this book could be used as an instruction manual. Portions of this book are called a "Cook-book for a Sacred Life", it is a classic of the 60s counter culture, and a lot of fun to read.

    Book preview

    Be Here Now - Ram Dass

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    CONTENTS

    1

    JOURNEY

    THE TRANSFORMATION:

    DR. RICHARD ALPERT, Ph.D

    INTO

    BABA RAM DASS

    2

    FROM BINDU TO OJAS

    THE CORE BOOK

    3

    COOKBOOK FOR A SACRED LIFE

    A MANUAL FOR CONSCIOUS BEING

    4

    PAINTED CAKES

    BOOKS

    COST DISTRIBUTION

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    HANUMAN FOUNDATION

    A CURRENT NOTE

    BE HERE NOW was originally distributed in pamphlet form by Lama Foundation and was subsequently published by Lama Foundation as this book, more than 928,300 copies of which have been distributed by Crown Publishers to date. In the summer of 1977 Lama Foundation decided to give the copyright and half the proceeds from BE HERE NOW to Hanuman Foundation to further distribute the energy generated by this book through the projects of Hanuman Foundation. For this generous sacrifice and gesture of faith, Hanuman Foundation would like to thank Lama Foundation.

    Hanuman Foundation, instigated by Ram Dass, was incorporated in California in 1974 as a tax-exempt non-profit corporation to promulgate spiritual well-being among members of the society as a whole through education and service, by spiritual training and by publications and recordings, and to promote the study, practice, and teaching of spiritual knowledge. A newsletter and catalog are sent semi-annually describing the activities of Hanuman Foundation, which include the Prison-Ashram Project, Dying Project, Hanuman Tape Library, Ram Dass’ lecture tours and retreats, and other tentative projects. If you would like to receive this newsletter please include a first-class stamp with your name and address to Hanuman Foundation, Box 203, 524 San Anselmo Avenue, San Anselmo, CA 94960.

    JAI HANUMAN!

    006_f_p8.tif007_f_p9.tif

    DR. RICHARD ALPERT, Ph.D INTO BABA RAM DASS

    008_f_p10.tif

    NAMASTÉ

    OUR-STORY

    There are three stages in this journey that I have been on! The first, the social science stage; the second, the psychedelic stage; and the third, the yogi stage. They are summating—that is, each is contributing to the next. It’s like the unfolding of a lotus flower. Now, as I look back, I realize that many of the experiences that made little sense to me at the time they occurred were prerequisites for what was to come later. I want to share with you the parts of the internal journey that never get written up in the mass media: I’m not interested in the political parts of the story; I’m not interested in what you read in the Saturday Evening Post about LSD. This is the story of what goes on inside a human being who is undergoing all these experiences.

    SUCCESS

    In 1961, the beginning of March, I was at perhaps the highest point of my academic career. I had just returned from being a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley: I had been assured of a permanent post that was being held for me at Harvard, if I got my publications in order. I held appointments in four departments at Harvard—the Social Relations Department, the Psychology Department, the Graduate School of Education, and the Health Service (where I was a therapist); I had research contracts with Yale and Stanford. In a worldly sense, I was making a great income and I was a collector of possessions.

    I had an apartment in Cambridge that was filled with antiques and I gave very charming dinner parties. I had a Mercedes-Benz sedan and a Triumph 500 CC motorcycle and a Cessna 172 airplane and an MG sports car and a sailboat and a bicycle. I vacationed in the Caribbean where I did scuba-diving. I was living the way a successful bachelor professor is supposed to live in the American world of he who makes it. I wasn’t a genuine scholar, but I had gone through the whole academic trip. I had gotten my Ph.D.; I was writing books. I had research contracts. I taught courses in Human Motivation, Freudian Theory, Child Development. But what all this boils down to is that I was really a very good game player.

    My lecture notes were the ideas of other men, subtly presented, and my research was all within the Zeitgeist—all that which one was supposed to research about.

    In 1955 I had started doing therapy and my first therapy patient had turned me on to pot. I had not smoked regularly after that, but only sporadically, and I was still quite a heavy drinker. But this first patient had friends and they had friends and all of them became my patients. I became a hip therapist, for the hip community at Stanford. When I’d go to the parties, they’d all say Here comes the shrink and I would sit in the corner looking superior. In addition, I had spent five years in psychoanalysis at a cool investment of something like $26,000.

    Before March 6th, which was the day I took Psylocybin, one of the psychedelics, I felt something was wrong in my world, but I couldn’t label it in any way so as to get hold of it. I felt that the theories I was teaching in psychology didn’t make it, that the psychologists didn’t really have a grasp of the human condition, and that the theories I was teaching, which were theories of achievement and anxiety and defense mechanisms and so on, weren’t getting to the crux of the matter.

    My colleagues and I were 9 to 5 psychologists: we came to work every day and we did our psychology, just like you would do insurance or auto mechanics, and then at 5 we went home and were just as neurotic as we were before we went to work. Somehow, it seemed to me, if all of this theory were right, it should play more intimately into my own life. I understood the requirement of being objective for a scientist, but this is a most naive concept in social sciences as we are finding out. And whatever the psychoanalysis did (and it did many things, I’m sure) I still was a neurotic at the end of those five years of psychoanalysis. Even my therapist thought so, because when I stopped analysis to go to Harvard, he said, You are too sick to leave analysis. Those were his final words. But because I had been trained in Freudian theory, I knew his game well enough to enjoy this terribly sophisticated, competitive relationship with my analyst, and I would say to him, Well in Freud’s 1906 paper, don’t you recall he said this, and when I’m saying this you should be interpreting . . . For this I was paying $20 an hour!

    Something was wrong. And the something wrong was that I just didn’t know, though I kept feeling all along the way that somebody else must know even though I didn’t. The nature of life was a mystery to me. All the stuff I was teaching was just like little molecular bits of stuff but they didn’t add up to a feeling anything like wisdom. I was just getting more and more knowledgeable. And I was getting very good at bouncing three knowledge balls at once. I could sit in a doctoral exam, ask very sophisticated questions and look terribly wise. It was a hustle.

    DISSATISFACTION

    Now my predicament as a social scientist was that I was not basically a scholar. I came out of a Jewish anxiety-ridden high-achieving tradition. Though I had been through five years of psychoanalysis, still, every time I lectured, I would get extraordinary diarrhea and tension. Lecturing five days a week made it quite a complex problem to keep my stomach operating. But whatever my motivations, they drove me so hard that despite the fact that I was a very mediocre student (in fact, I could never get into Harvard no matter how hard I tried, even using all my father’s political influence) I finally found myself on the faculty of the good universities.

    I could study 10 hours and prepare a really good lecture on Freud or Human Motivation, but it was all as if it were behind a wall. It was theoretical. I theorized this or that. I espoused these ideas, these intellectual concepts, quite apart from my own experiential base. Although I could bring all kinds of emotional zeal to bear on my presentation, there was a lack of validity in my guts about what I was doing. And, to my suppressed dismay, I found that this stance was considered acceptable by most of my colleagues who seemed, in their attempt to become scientific, to think of personality in terms of variables. Children were nothing but ambulatory variables, and no matter how hard we tried, by the time we got to the legitimacy of a highly operationally-defined variable, it had lost its gut feeling. So the concepts we were working with were intellectual fun and games, but they weren’t affecting my life.

    Here I was, sitting with the boys of the first team in cognitive psychology, personality psychology, developmental psychology, and in the midst of this I felt here were men and women who, themselves, were not highly evolved beings. Their own lives were not fulfilled. There was not enough human beauty, human fulfillment, human contentment. I worked hard and the keys to the kingdom were handed to me. I was being promised all of it. I had felt I had got into whatever the inner circle meant: I could be Program Chairman for Division 7 of the A.P.A. and I could be on government committees, and have grants, and travel about and sit on doctorate committees. But there was still that horrible awareness that I didn’t know something or other which made it all fall together. And there was a slight panic in me that I was going to spend the next forty years not knowing, and that apparently that was par for the course. And in off hours, we played Go, or poker, and cracked old jokes. The whole thing was too empty. It was not honest enough.

    And there was some point as a professor at Stanford and Harvard when I experienced being caught in some kind of a meaningless game in which the students were exquisite at playing the role of students and the faculty were exquisite at playing the role of faculty. I would get up and say what I had read in books and they’d all write it down and give it back as answers on exams but nothing was happening. I felt as if I were in a sound-proof room. Not enough was happening that mattered—that was real.

    And as a therapist I felt caught in the drama of my own theories. The research data showed that Rogerian patients ended up saying positive statements, and Freudian patients ended up talking about their mother because of subtle reinforcement clues—it was so obvious. I would sit with my little notebook and when the person would start talking about his mother, I’d make a note and it didn’t take long for the patient to realize that he got his note taken, he got his pellet, every time he said certain things. And pretty soon he would be Freudianized.

    In the face of this feeling of malaise, I ate more, collected more possessions, collected more appointments and positions and status, more sexual and alcoholic orgies, and more wildness in my life.

    Everytime I went to a family gathering, I was the boy who made it. I was a Professor at Harvard and everybody stood around in awe and listened to my every word, and all I felt was that horror that I knew inside that I didn’t know. Of course, it was all such beautiful, gentle horror, because there was so much reward involved.

    I had an empire in a place called Center for Research in Personality: a corner office in a building I’d helped design; with two secretaries and many graduate and undergraduate research assistants. I had done all this in about three years. I was really driven. Until you know a good, Jewish middleclass, upwardly mobile, anxiety-ridden neurotic, you haven’t met a real achiever!

    My Judaism was a political Judaism. I came out of a tradition of folk religion—the spirit escaped me somehow, although we did all the Yom Kippur and Passover Services. But Dad was on the Board of Trustees that hired and fired Rabbis, so how could I get into a feeling with a spiritual leader if my father was hiring and firing these guys.

    Down the hall from my big empire, there was a little office. It had been a closet and they needed an extra office, so they cleared out the closet and put a desk in there and in that closet was Timothy Leary. He had been bicycling around Italy, bouncing checks, and David McClelland found him and brought him back as a creative gift to western science. Tim and I became drinking buddies together. Then we started to teach courses together, such as the first year clinical course—practicum—on Existential Transactional Behavior Change.

    The more time I spent with Tim, the more I realized he had an absolutely extraordinary intellect. He really knew a lot. I found him extremely stimulating and the students found him exciting to be around, because of his openness to new ideas and his willingness to take wild risks in thinking.

    One night when we were drinking together, we plotted a trip across North and South America, and when I said I flew a plane, he said, Great, we’ll fly in your plane.

    And I said, Wonderful, and neglected to tell him that I had only a student license.

    So I secretly set about getting a license in order to meet him on August 1st in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he was summering. There we would start our journey.

    At that time I was a consultant for a School Mathematics Study Group, a mathematics program in Education at Stanford. I got my license and an airplane on the same day and flew to Mexico the next day in a death-defying leap. When I got there, I found that Timothy had done some other type of flying, just about the week before. Frank Baron, who was a psychologist at Cal, an old friend of Tim’s, had introduced him to an anthropologist in Mexico and they had come to know about the Tionanactyl, the flesh of the Gods, the Magic Mushrooms of Mexico, which one obtained from Crazy Juanna, a woman up in the mountains who ate the mushrooms all the time. Contact was made with her and the mushrooms were obtained.

    Tim had eaten nine of these mushrooms—so many male and so many female mushrooms—with a group of others around a swimming pool and had had a profound experience. He said, I learned more in the six or seven hours of this experience than I had learned in all my years as a psychologist.

    That is a strong statement!

    When I arrived in Cuernavaca, the mushrooms were all gone, and so was the zeal to go on a trip across South America, because what was the sense in doing external journeying when obviously what Timothy had been looking for was inside his own head.

    So I hung out in Tepetzlan with David McClelland and his family and in Cuernavaca with Tim and his entourage, and then flew back to the United States with Tim and Jackie his son, and an Iguana.

    And I went to be a visiting professor at Cal and Tim went back to Harvard. And by the time I got back, Timothy had a large psychedelic project going.

    He had consulted with Aldous Huxley, who was then visiting at M.I.T., and Aldous and Tim and a number of graduate students had contacted Sandoz, who produced a synthetic of the magic mushrooms called Psylocybin, and they had gotten a test batch of this and were busy taking it and administering it. When I got back to Cambridge in the spring, I was invited to share in this bounty.

    TURNING ON

    The night that was chosen turned out to be the night of the biggest snowstorm of the year and it was to be at Tim’s home in Newton, a few blocks from the home of my parents where I had been visiting for dinner. I plowed through the snow, came in and we sat around the kitchen table and there were about three or four of us and we passed the bottle of pills and I took my 10 milligrams. That was my preparation and my set and setting, but beyond that I trusted Timothy. I had seen that Timothy had had a profound experience and he was somebody with an intellect that I understood. I knew that he was not interpersonally destructive—he might be destructive of institutions, but not of individuals. He was a very loving person.

    We took a very small dosage, (later we were using 5 or 10 times as much) and the first part of the experience was comparable to a strong pot-high, I’d say. A little more dramatic, a little more intense. Clearly though something happened.

    During the first part of this experience with Psylocybin, we got into a very low-level tragicomedy type thing. Tim’s son’s dog had been running in the snow and upon entering the warm kitchen lay gasping and panting. To our timeless minds, his struggle for breath continued too long and we thought he was about to expire. What could we do? We could hardly carry the dog through a blizzard in the early Sunday morning to the vet’s, some four miles away, especially since we were all very high, and thus not sure about the dog’s state. It seemed our concern mounted and the dog passed into a nearby room where it appeared to collapse. We finally decided the only path was to summon 11-year old Jackie from the Late TV show upstairs. Since he wasn’t under a chemical influence, we would watch his interaction with the dog, rather than frighten him with our own suspicions.

    Jackie was not pleased at being disturbed by us, (merely to find out what he was watching on TV), but the problem was quickly solved by the dog, who, upon hearing Jackie’s voice, leapt back to life, ready to play.

    Now a few hours later I had gone off by myself to reflect upon these new feelings and senses. A deep calm pervaded my being. The rug crawled and the pictures smiled, all of which delighted me. Then I saw a figure standing about 8 feet away, where a moment before there had been none. I peered into the semi-darkness and recognized none other than myself, in cap and gown and hood, as a professor. It was as if that part of me, which was Harvard professor, had separated or disassociated itself from me.

    How interesting . . . an external hallucination, I thought. Well, I worked hard to get that status but I don’t really need it. Again I settled back into the cushions, separate now from my professorness, but at that moment the figure changed. Again I leaned forward straining to see. Ah, me again. But now it was that aspect of me who was a social cosmopolite. Okay, so that goes too, I thought. Again and again the figure changed and I recognized over there all the different aspects I knew to be me . . . cellist, pilot, lover, and so on. With each new presentation, I again and again reassured myself that I didn’t need that anyway.

    Then I saw the figure become that in me which was Richard Alpert-ness, that is, my basic identity that had always been Richard. I associated the name with myself and my parents called me Richard: Richard, you’re a bad boy. So Richard has badness. Then Richard, aren’t you beautiful! Then Richard has beauty. Thus develop all these aspects of self.

    Sweat broke out on my forehead. I wasn’t at all sure I could do without being Richard Alpert. Did that mean I’d have amnesia? Was that what this drug was going to do to me? Would it be permanent? Should I call Tim? Oh, what the hell—so I’ll give up being Richard Alpert. I can always get a new social identity. At least I have my body . . . But I spoke too soon.

    As I looked down at my legs for reassurance, I could see nothing below the kneecaps, and slowly, now to my horror, I saw the progressive disappearance of limbs and then torso, until all I could see with my eyes open was the couch on which I had sat. A scream formed in my throat. I felt that I must be dying since there was nothing in my universe that led me to believe in life after leaving the body.

    Doing without professorness or loverness, or even Richard Alpertness, okay, but I did NEED the body.

    The panic mounted, adrenalin shot through my system—my mouth became dry, but along with this, a voice sounded inside—inside what, I don’t know—an intimate voice asked very quietly, and rather jocularly, it seemed to me, considering how distraught I was, . . . but who’s minding the store?

    When I could finally focus on the question, I realized that although everything by which I knew myself, even my body and this life itself, was gone, still I was fully aware! Not only that, but this aware I was watching the entire drama, including the panic, with calm compassion.

    Instantly, with this recognition, I felt a new kind of calmness—one of a profundity never experienced before. I had just found that I, that scanning device—that point—that essence—that place beyond. A place where I existed independent of social and physical identity. That which was I was beyond Life and Death. And something else—that I Knew—it really Knew. It was wise, rather than just knowledgeable. It was a voice inside that spoke truth. I recognized it, was one with it, and felt as if my entire life of looking to the outside world for reassurance—David Reisman’s other-directed being, was over. Now I need only look within to that place where I Knew.

    Fear had turned to exaltation. I ran out into the snow laughing as the hugh flakes swirled about me. In a moment the house was lost from view, but it was all right because inside I Knew.

    Around 5 in the morning I walked back, plowing through the snow to my parents’ home, and I thought, Wouldn’t it be nice; I’ll shovel the walk—young tribal buck shovels the walk. So I started to shovel the walk and my parents’ faces appeared at the upstairs window.

    Come to bed, you idiot. Nobody shovels snow at 5 in the morning.

    And I looked up at them and I heard the external voice I had been listening to for 30 years, and inside me, something said, It’s all right to shovel snow and it’s all right to be happy.

    And I looked up at them and I laughed and did a jig and went back to shoveling snow. And they closed the windows and then I looked up and inside they were smiling too. That was my first experience of giving a contact high!

    But also, you can see in that moment in the early morning the seeds of the breakaway. The seeds of the ability to be able to confront, and even disagree with, an existing institution and know and trust that inside place that says it’s all right. It’s something I could never have done without anxiety until that moment—until that day.

    Now I thought at that moment, Wow, I’ve got it made. I’m just a new beautiful being—I’m just an inner self—all I’ll ever need to do is look inside and I’ll know what to do and I can always trust it, and here I’ll be forever.

    But two or three days later I was talking about the whole thing in the past tense. I was talking about how I experienced this thing, because I was back being that anxiety-neurotic, in a slightly milder form, but still, my old personality was sneaking back up on me.

    Well, the next day I had to give my lecture in Social Relations 143, Human Motivation, and it presented me with a bit of a problem because I couldn’t find anywhere in the psychology teachings anything about what had happened to me the night before.

    Now, what we did at first at Harvard was to tell all of our colleagues about this extraordinary thing that was happening to us, and they all shared our delight, as any scientists do when a fellow scientist finds a new avenue into the unknown. And so the first week they listened with delight. And then at the end of the first week we all went back into our experimental cell—the living room by the fire and opened the bottle again and took some more psylocybin to chart this course further. And the next week we had shared a deeper experience and we

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